Churchland lab

This post is to highlight the accomplishments of the students and postdocs in my lab in the past 12 months. We’ve made a ton of progress thanks to their hard work, talent and dedication. David Raposo (back row, right) published his first paper about rat and human behavior and made major inroads in understanding the neural circuits driving the behavior. John Sheppard (back row, left) has a paper in submission about cue weighting, and was awarded two graduate fellowships based on his proposed thesis work. Amanda Brown (front row, second from left) became an expert in animal training and is known around the lab as the “mouse whisperer” for her ability to generate stable, consistent behavior from these animals. Matt Kaufman (front row, left) joined the lab and has already got us thinking about the dimensionality of neural responses during decision formation versus during movement. Onyekachi Odemene (front row, second from right) joined on as our newest Watson School student and is already training mice effectively and laying the groundwork for a new direction in the lab. Mike Ryan (back row, center) joined us as a part-time technician on his way to graduate school and is already so good at making drives that we are plotting to keep him here. All told, it is a great pleasure working with these folks and I am excited to see what discoveries they will make in 2013.